European tuning preferences

[Simon Husbands]

Hi to all on this splendid list!

Dean Reyburn posed the question as to whether European tuners use machines to
aid their tunings. I am an English trainee tuner/technician in my third year at
school, and thought it might be interesting for the list to see what we are
taught concerning these machines.

I have the feeling that the English piano trade may be somewhat stuffy as
compared to the American ( apologies to any UK techs reading, especially Barrie!
) and this may just be a facet of the British people in general, but on my
college course we are led to belive that mechanical tuning aids are the work of
the devil! There are a few different devices available for us to use, should we
care to, but when we try them out it is invariably treated as if we are
participating in some kind of arcane ritual! Obviously it's good to try anything
out to gain insight and experience, but we are told most tuners in the UK do not
use machines. I appreciate that machines may not always be able to tell you what
to do, and that they can never replace the ears as a tuning 'device', but it
seems to me that they could be a useful tool.

We are often reminded that on our course, we have had tuners come from a
background of never using anything other than a machine! They come to learn how
to tune 'properly' using just their ears ( and hands ) and are surprised that
they leave being better tuners and faster ones too!

Now I may be getting this wrong - there MAY be a lot of tuners out there with
machines, but the piano community in this country is so out of touch with each
other it's hard to know for sure. You only have to look at the number of UK
tuners/technicians taking this list to see how behind we all are. I suspect
most piano people in this country aren't even aware of the internet, let alone
aware of all the piano specific stuff that goes on. Do a search for 'piano' and
'UK' and you'll come up with 5 sites, all of them Barrie Heaton's!

I'm emigrating!

Simon


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